The other Robin Williams

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"When standup works, it's wonderful. And when it doesn't? it?s like high-wire flying: you?re always on the edge of it not working."Picture: Bryce Duffy/Corbis Outline/APL

There's the motormouth comic, a manic madman with a
heart of gold. And there's the psychopath - simply a madman. Which
of his characters, Stephanie Bunbury wonders, says more about the
man himself?

Watching Robin Williams, you can't help but imagine that
somewhere under his jacket is a switch that throws between his two
performing selves. One of those selves is Robin the funny man, who
was once a motormouthed maniac (Good Morning Vietnam) and
is now a gloopily sentimental missionary for the healing power of
laughter.

We have seen a lot of that funny-self-gone-soft in recent years,
mostly in films so horribly syrupy they practically constitute a
genre of their own: Toys, Jack, Fathers' Day, What Dreams May
Come, Patch Adams, Jakob the Liar and Bicentennial
Man. "In most of these films," wrote critic Joe Queenan,
"Williams played some variation on Mr Chucklehead, the little boy
who didn't want to grow up, the humble ingenue who believed that if
we only responded to the cute little munchkin inside all of us, it
would help cure cancer, fix broken marriages, re-establish contact
with the dead and take the sting out of the Holocaust".

So it is not surprising that the Robin inside has cultivated a
second screen self. This other Robin Williams - an odious creep who
speaks rather too softly, smiles without showing any teeth and
probably leaves behind a trail of slime if he shakes your hand - is
usually a villain. As Lon Chaney used to say, there is nothing
funny about a clown in the moonlight, which only goes to prove
there is really nothing new to be said about movies.

Seeing Mrs Doubtfire turn bad, however, shocked quite a
few critics at the time of Insomnia, to the point that
many of them hailed Death to Smoochy (Williams' first
villain, a crazed TV host) and the classy Insomnia as
amounting to a career change. Here was Robin Williams cunningly
extending his range: this was the mark of his maturity. Now, any
fool could see he had been a real actor all along.

My wife saw under all this comedy and everything else something else down there that gives the other side of the equation."

With four of these films on the slate, however, it is clear that
it is more a character than a career: the creepy Williams is just
his alternative schtick. Its chief feature is a thin, tight mouth,
which suggests the funny Williams is being physically repressed,
like some Chucky-like Russian doll, within the unnervingly demure
exterior of Robin #2.

The films in which this second Williams appears are surprisingly
diverse, even if he is the same in all of them. He has been
repressed and psychotic as a murderous detective story writer in
Chris Nolan's tormented Insomnia, repressed and perverted as a lab
technician fixated on one family's happy snaps in Mark Romanek's
arty horror One Hour Photo, and now he is repressed and a
social misfit in The Final Cut, which is a shot at genre
sci-fi by first-time feature director Omar Naim.

Robin Williams (right) and Jim Caviezel in a scene from The Final Cut.

Actually, The Final Cut is a little different in that
Alan Hakman, Williams' character, is not a villain. The story is
set in a dystopian future in which most people have chips in their
brains that record their memories as films that are edited as
memorials once they are dead; Hakman is the best of all the
cutters, one of the technical experts who edit down and censor each
client's memories to become a film that can safely be played at
their funerals.

He takes more pride in his work than we are led to feel it
deserves (as does Sy in One Hour Photo). Although he has a
girlfriend (Mira Sorvino), he is clearly most comfortable alone
with his editing suite, meticulously piecing lives together and, as
he sees it, posthumously absolving the dead of their sins. He
cannot absolve himself, however; he is haunted by the memory of a
boy he dared to walk a dangerous plank over a well, with fatal
results.

Williams says that, as an only child, he has thrived on solitary
activities all his life. As an adult he has taken up long-distance
cycling, which he says, "is very comfortable for me. The isolation
is part of being a comic. You are kind of an observer and then you
perform". But, as soon becomes clear in our interview, Williams
performs all the time.

It is not just that he can't help putting on funny voices or
riffing on the most unlikely subjects; when he talks about his
director Omar Naim, for example, he adopts the voice of a Barnum
ringmaster to boom - "Young Lebanese Christian boy! What more can
you ask? Don't get any better 'n that!" No, it is that these are
the only moments when he speaks fluently, his personal comic
relief.

On set, he says in passing, "I perform between takes and that
kind of keeps everyone going". Would an all-day Robin Williams
performance keep you going, or drive you to the brink of madness?
It is hard to know, but harder to conceive of anyone needing so
very badly to make people laugh at every available moment.

In truth, he can barely finish a sentence in his normal voice;
unless he's being funny as hell, the hyper-articulate torrent of
words dries up and he starts bumbling and mumbling, to the point
that parts of my transcript barely make any sense. Small wonder,
then, that his string of dark roles has run in tandem with his
return to stand-up.

Stand-up has always been his refuge. Williams found fame as a
visiting alien in the television sitcom Mork and Mindy in
the '70s. It ran for four series and made Williams a star, but he
says nobody told him when it was axed; he found out while reading
the entertainment trade magazines. Stand-up was his "survival
mechanism" through the subsequent dark time, "the only thing that
really kept me going, because you could talk about it, make fun of
it and still make money from it".

It is clear that, for him, stand-up is the real thing. "It gives
you a kind of fearlessness, because you know that to go out and do
it you have to be ready to put your arse on the line. Directors say
they like working with comics, usually because they're not afraid
to try stuff. They do anything to get the laugh; they are shameless
on that level, but also fearless.

"And they have a certain concentration because of what they do.
Chris Rock says it's a bit like boxing, because you've got to keep
going back and training again. It feeds me in that way, the mind
working like this. When it works, it's wonderful. And when it
doesn't it's like high-wire flying: you're always on the
edge of it not working."

Recently Williams has been talking on stage about family life
and George W. Bush: plenty to talk about there, too. "Oh, he has
been the gift," he says. "Thank you, God!" Not an especially nice
gift, however. Williams was one of a battery of Hollywood stars who
campaigned for John Kerry.

He would like, he says, to be zany Robin Williams on film again,
but those roles do not seem to come along any more. "It's hard to
find a script where you can kick out that hard and if you do,
people say (he puts on a very proper, affected voice), That's
not the role, you know'."

This may have as much to do with the times as it does with his
career trajectory. Joe Queenan's theory is that, as a phenomenally
gifted (and, at one time, highly chemically revved) comic, Williams
embodied the wild and crazy guy his fellow baby boomers imagined
themselves to be. "His own generation found his mixture of
manic, disrespectful comedy and heart-on-sleeve mawkishness a
perfect reflection of their own self-image as iconoclasts secretly
blessed with hearts of gold."

For a younger generation that outgrew their own version of
Williams - the man-boy of Jack or Jumanji - about
a decade ago, this whole package is toe-curlingly embarrassing.
Williams, says Queenan, "is viewed as the Antichrist by many people
under 30".

Anyway, there simply isn't the call for babbling maniacs any
more. For a more laconic skating-gen version, the type reached its
natural apotheosis in the much younger Jay in Kevin Smith's films,
discoursing unstoppably about videos. Action and effects are the go
now. Anyway, no kid wants to hear the babble of a middle-aged man.
It's like seeing Dad try to dance at the school disco.

Whatever, Williams says that these days it is only in animated
movies that he is given leeway to let rip. This year he voiced five
characters in George Miller's Happy Feet, an animated film
about penguins. He loved Miller because he let him go crazy with
it, just like the old days. "He put me in a room with all these
Latino comics and it was so much fun; I played an Argentinian
penguin, an Emperor penguin and a sea lion, among others."

He told Miller he'd come straight over to Australia if Bush won.
"I just told him to save me a house, to find me something by the
water."

All hyperbole, of course; Williams grew up in San Francisco and,
he says, will continue to hold on to his footing there. Other
cities, such as Vancouver or Sydney, are attractive largely
inasmuch as they resemble San Francisco.

Actually, it is not quite true to say he is no longer offered
comedies, but they are sometimes so inappropriate he wonders what
the people who asked for him could have been thinking. After
One Hour Photo, he said he had been sent a script for a
new Pink Panther film about the detective's youth. "I went,
Uh, I'm 50. This character's supposed to be in the police
academy'. You get that and you just go, Thank you, but please
increase your dosage'."

The death of his close friend Christopher Reeve has only
increased his awareness of his mortality. He often mentions his age
- it's actually 53 now - seemingly keen to emphasise that despite
all those boy-man roles he has played in the last decade he has no
intention of becoming an old fool who thinks he can romance
teenagers on screen through sagging jowls. Short and vaguely
simian, he was never quite leading man material anyway, other than
as a joker. Dead Poets' Society was the shining, if
typically mawkish, exception. So while he has not been offered any
big movies recently, he says, he knows that Hollywood would only
see him in a support role. Which is OK.

"I just want to do characters now. You hit 50 and you're in
Walter Brennan land," he said a couple of years ago. "You start
finding characters and it's not the idea of, like, I'm going
to be in a movie where I look fabulous' because you don't look
fabulous any more. Your hair starts growing out of your nose and
leaving your head. Even my children say, Dad, you're old -
set some limits'."

There is a kind of liberty, he says, swimming in these murky
waters after so many years generating sticky sunshine. "The
pressure is off," he muses, considering the odd fish that is
The Final Cut.

"There is not the (feeling) you have to be likeable or sellable
on that level, because the character himself is distant and
withdrawn. And this is a smaller movie, so you don't have to go out
saying, 'Is this sellable?' Of course I want it to get
distribution, but it stands more as a picture, as an idea and as a
character, rather than being a star vehicle. It's not designed to
be that."

Unfortunately, it is not necessarily very successful. "Naim
seems out of his depth when it comes to handling such unpredictable
talents as Williams and Sorvino," wrote Variety. "The two
have no onscreen sexual chemistry and pitch their performances in
completely different keys. Packed with potentially good ideas that
don't quite pay off, the script never quite fuses separate
narrative threads - love story, political intrigue or tale of
redemption."

Even potentially good ideas, however, are better than the dearth
of ideas in most of the films we see at the multiplex. I felt quite
kindly towards The Final Cut, muddled and mannered as it
is; essentially it is about the sovereignty of our identities,
which is surely a subject worthy of discussion. And I liked Robin
Williams for choosing to make it, although I suspect we will see
him in quite a few more glutinous family comedies before he finally
hangs up his red nose.

Because somewhere in the middle of the interview he mentions his
character's relationship with his girlfriend and how he thought she
saw him as an artist. "She can see something else going on," he
says. "As I've been lucky enough to have with my wife, who saw
under all this comedy and everything else something else down there
that gives the other side of the equation."

There it is again; that mixture of sentiment and smug
complacency that colours all those jokeless comedies Williams has
made in what we can only hope was his middle period. That mix of
sugar and self-regard.

That's why people find him so irritating, for all that he is
quite extraordinarily witty. Which is the worry, really. All he has
to do is throw that switch and there it will be: the other Robin
Williams, raring to go. Let's hope for a long reprieve.